Department of Health News

This news item expired on 12/31/2014, so the information below could be outdated or incorrect.

Fish is Known as a Brain Food & It Just Got Even Smarter!

The consequences of a stroke could be fatal if not handled appropriately. According to the Centers for Disease Control, this devastating disease, the third leading cause of death for both men and women in the US, actually affects about 55,000 more women than men annually. That’s a lot of women – a lot of us.

Lifestyle plays a large role in stroke prevention. Many of the same behaviors that we know about for heart disease prevention – stress reduction, diet and exercise – apply for stroke prevention, as well. After all, it’s the same blood vessels, just different location! (Heart vs. brain.)

We’ve known for a while that eating fish and omega-3 fatty acids are associated with a lower risk of heart disease, and Oscar Franco and his colleagues at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard set out to see if the same is applicable for stroke prevention as well. They reviewed a whopping 38 studies involving 794,000 participants to answer a series of important questions: Does eating fish help to prevent strokes? Does taking an omega-3 supplement help? Is one better than another?

The findings of Franco, et al., published in the British Medical Journal, show that cooking a good meal is better than popping a pill.

The researchers found that although both can modestly reduce your risk of stroke, the results were only significant for the fish group, not the supplement group. In fact, the more fish a participant consumed per week, the lower the risk.